Carolyn Hax: Friend equates breakup with betrayal

Sunday

Apr 16, 2017 at 5:00 AM

Dear Carolyn: I have a friend whose girlfriend broke up with him.

Months later, he keeps going on and on about how she betrayed him and hurt him so bad. I’ve tried nicely saying to him that she didn’t lead him on or lie to him. That sometimes people break up even when they love each other.

He feels that because he loved her, she betrayed him, and that’s all there is to it. I’ve had other friends react this way as well. They think just because they want to stay in a relationship that the relationship should remain intact, even if the other person wants something else. And when a breakup happens it’s a “betrayal.”

What can I say to these friends? — Betrayal or Break Up

He gets to see her as a bad person instead of seeing himself as the person she no longer finds attractive enough to keep.

You can say this to your friends as-is, though whether you should is more complicated. You’ve already said a much nicer version of the same thing to this friend and he had none of it.

I suppose you could try again with your buddy whose gal left him, making a different version of the same point: that sometimes people are both great people and partners but just aren’t right for each other.

But as you search for the perfectly phrased thunk to the forehead, you also have to contend with the second issue: whether it’s even your place to correct your friends’ thinking.

In many cases, it won’t be. People deserve liberal license to be themselves, and post-breakup people get an extra allowance to bray about cosmic injustice.

It’s when the lamentation phase stretches for months and becomes a tacit indictment of the ex’s character — “betrayed” is a big charge — that I can see stepping in.

I have no way of telling whether it’s a risk here, but such blame can be the seed that grows into justification for intimate violence. Behold the description you used of your friends’ mindset: “They think just because they want to stay in the relationship that the relationship should remain intact, even if the other person wants something else.” How is that not the baseline logic of control?

Accordingly, you have more latitude to advocate from the ex’s perspective.

For those who can’t see past their entitlement and/or hurt feelings, often the path through their defenses is to make it about them.

If needed, you can make it about you, too. “I know you’re hurting. I would have a real problem, though, with being blamed for a breakup the way you’re blaming her. If my feelings change, then how is that not completely my prerogative? Both to feel what I feel, and to break up — which is the honest thing to do, after all?”